Can someone point me to information on archiving discussions? I'm not aware of this functionality and wonder if we might have a good use case for it. I just looked in the admin console, and assuming tht's where it gets turned on, it isn't obvious where you'd do that.

It's very legacy and probably originally a Jive-x thing, Tracy You have to use the advanced settings and then admin console > spaces > [then select a space to do it for] settings > thread archive settings.

It looks like this:

I have a feeling it might not work with the new content types...but it's worth a test in your preview, I guess!

This actually does almost exactly what we'd like it to do for our use cases (would rather have creation date than inactive date, but I can work with this). THANKS so much for pointing this out. I'm going to have to test it out in preview for sure!!

And PS - I suspect this isn't super well-known because of where it was added to the Admin Console. Our conversation here implies that it is targeted at Discussions. And yet it is not found on the Space > Settings > Discussions page, or linked to from the System > Settings > Discussions page. Even if I did a search, I'd be unlikely to find it, because I wouldn't be searching for thread. That is decidedly engineering language, not customer language.

Shai Sagi - if this isn't on your map to include when you implement some sort of archiving functionality, it should be. Needs a bit of tweaking in terms of how it works (for example, add in additional triggers for archive rules), and FOR SURE how to get to it (maybe also surface it in the front end for place managers?), but this is an excellent foundation.

Tracy Maurer, I am glad that my post has sparked an introduction to an old (but new to you ) Jive feature! We are on an old version of Jive (Jive-x version 8 hosted).

I did raise this issue with my company's technical team who owns our Jive environment, and they reported that they are not aware of an "un-archive" feature. Admins can edit a post, even if it is archived, but it does not appear that there is a way to un-archive something. This to me seems a little crazy - what if you accidentally clicked "archive"?! If others newly use this feature, be cautious of this aspect to the feature. If someone can Jive can correct me, I would be very happy!

For sure going to have to play around with this in our Preview site to see how it works before we decide to move forward. And I'm still excited that we might be able to automate something that right now we are doing 100% manually.

Some of the things I wonder about on this are:

What happens to incoming links?

What happens to content shares?

If I don't set the process to delete or move the item, how does it function - by simply not surfacing archived content in search?

Anyway, glad to have something to play around with to see if it will help us with archiving old content and thus pruning search results.

Alexis, is there a place where you can manually archive as well? Wow! Like I said, I've never had a customer use this - and I wasn't able to get it to work on my demo instance. Looking at Tracy who is an amazing tester to fill me in.

Tracy, do you remember a million years ago when discussions were called threads? Pretty sure it was before my time...but that's how old this feature is.

So back when it was Clearspace, and was more forum based then? WOW! And no, I wasn't a community manager then. We didn't have that version, but I think tested it before piloting and going live on maybe v2.5. I started as a CM in 2010.

Apologies for the delay in response! I spoke with my technical team on this topic, and it does not appear that there is an option to manually archive content. The only way we are aware of archiving content is through the admin console (as seen in your screenshot). The biggest downfall I have found with this feature is that once a piece of content is archived, there is not a way to un-archive it. But, I am not necessarily convinced that there is no way to un-archive something (perhaps someone from Jive could chime in). Also, it should be noted that we are currently on a very old version of Jive (hosted version 8). Therefore, I am uncertain if Jive has improved this feature/functionality in later versions.

We do like that you can setup this setting within specific community spaces, so it does not have to be turned on for our entire community environment, but rather at the space level.

Archiving allows the content to still be accessible to admins, in case we were to ever need to retrieve the content. Once an item is deleted, it is gone forever (unless it is a document, then it can be retrieved).

In our community, we are very strict on deletion rules since we handle customer content. We try to respect the content authored by a custom and never delete it, but simply archive it if we feel it should not be publicly posted, or it is just simply outdated information.

Since many of us were unaware of the feature at all, I sincerely doubt that it has been improved in recent releases. Though I am hopeful that it can be improved.

In fact, my testing in my Private Preview site would seem to indicate that it doesn't work at all in the 2018 release. Michelle Gantt may be right that the 2016 content evolution may have broken this functionality. Not sure if that would be considered a bug? Since I wasn't using the functionality before, I can't report it. I don't have the experience or knowledge to say how it used to work. Would be great if someone on this thread could report it and see if we can get it addressed for the future? This really is our largest use case for archiving, and I'd love to have a way to automate even part of the process.

I'm from Jive and I always love a challenge...I've had to go back into our own archived Jive community from the old days (Brewspace) to see what I can find out about this. Tracy Maurer, I found a question from Curtis Gross from 11 years ago!! That just tells you how long this has been around...

I also found this case: Jive7 thread archival questions from one of your colleagues at Oracle, Alexis - I don't know if you have access to this group, but the answer was that it was not possible to un-archive a thread. I found several other cases in AW and Support always said the same thing.

I was able to test out archiving on a 2016.3 instance - both with content evolution turned off and on. I was able to get it to work - in both cases. But, unfortunately, I can't see any way to un-archive something. It may be possible to run a DB query to change the setting of the content.

Tracy: one of the things I found in BS is that you first have to turn thread archiving on at the very top level (even if it gives you an error when you try to go there, you can get to it) - this tells how often the archiving procedure should run. Then you go to the individual space and tell it what to do for that space. Did you do both steps already? I hadn't done that the first time I tested it out so it didn't work. Let me know how it works in your preview - but from my testing, the message looks different than with the old content look and feel, but it does work.